The rants and raves of a technogeek
Uncategorized
What do you really know about the products you are reselling? – Call for discussion
Sep 3rd
Almost every day I get an email to my mailbox from one Asterisk/VoIP vendor or another, soliciting me to become their reseller/integrator. As a rule of thumb, my company doesn’t install PBX systems, at least not as our main business, so most of these products are fairly of no interest to us.
About 9 months GreenfieldTech was hired as part of a due diligence process, between two companies who wanted to collaborate in the distribution of an Asterisk based product. Our part of the due diligence was to evaluate the Asterisk product and ascertain it’s technical viability, roadmap length and per our recommendation – conformity to GPL and Digium licensing.
Our research showed that the vendor lacked proper understanding of GPL and Creative Commons licenses, where the developed product had violated various licenses of over 15 different Open Source packages. We included that into our report – which was then passed over to the various legal departments in both companies. Following the report, the vendor had concluded that conforming to the various GPL licensing or acquiring the proper IP licensing from the various respective owners will be too long and too costly, so they decided to dump the entire thing and start from scratch, with a new approach that doesn’t violate licenses.
Now, imagine a scenario where a vendor would offer us a reseller agreement, to a product that violates various Open Source licenses. That means that any given time, one of the Open Source IP owners that had been incorporated into the package can step up and say: “You are violating my IP, pay up or cash out!” – sure, that doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen.
So, my question is this: “What do you really know about the products you are reselling?” – have you ever truly gone through it with a fine tooth comb, understanding its parts, its associated licenses, its associated bindings – and to be more blunt, do you even care about it?
Happy birthday brent
Oct 29th
Here is what happens when someone has a birthday, specifically someone from Digium, during AstriDevCon:
Brent has a birthday during AstriDevCon 2010
Creative ideas for start-ups… maybe…
Nov 5th
Michael Eisenberg is a well known VC partner (Benchmark Capital) and an avid blogger. In one of his recent posts, Michael refers to 8 different approaches to raising a start-up company, in the midst of an economic crisis. The full blog entry can be found at his blog, however, after reading it myself, I would like to comment on it. The below section will also be commented to Michael’s blog for reference:
“Everyone in the company is a salesman – Your R&D team should be selling too”
This is an interesting approach, however, R&D people are R&D people because usually they don’t do sales well. Actually, most of the R&D people I know are the worst sales people I’ve ever met. To be honest, in my previous position, our R&D Manager basically screwed a 500,000$ deal that we worked on for 6 months, because I said something in the form of: “It’s possible to do, however, I can’t really say what would be required to do so.” – R&D people can easily sell products that are closed, not products that are under development. As start-ups are constantly in the development phase – this is a BAD idea.
“Hire sales people on commission only”
YES! This is a great idea, although, it means that you’ll need a hell of a lot more sales people to manage. When a sales person works on commissions only, it means that while he’s selling your stuff, he’s selling other stuff too. It requires a certain degree of finesse and agility to be able to manage such a team, but the general idea is good, actually it’s GREAT!
“Virtual company”
Michael’s idea of a virtual company isn’t new, dozens of companies around the world utilize this methodology. However, this methodology sometimes requires quite some resources. For example, according to Michael, the utilization of sites like oDesk and rent-a-coder may assist in your quest to lower general spending. That is true, however, it automatically poses a problem. Let us imagine that I develop a service that is made of 3 distinct areas of expertise. I hire all coders from oDesk, now, I need to remotely co-ordinate them all, so that the code I’ll get is manageable and well documented. If not, the end result will a running service that becomes stagnant, as no one can go into the code and continue its development (seen it happen to 2 of my customers, both start-ups).
“Choose Self-PR over paid search”
Hmmm… I can’t really comment on that, as I practice it – and can honestly say, it’s very hard.
“Focus on product”
Killer applications in the web are a must, if it’s not a killer – your service is dead in the water. Killer services like PokeTalk have a great potential to become the next big thing, but they highly rely on the company’s ability to market the product correctly within the available channels.
“New distribution channels”
Michael talks about the creation of affiliate programs – that’s not as simple as it sounds. Many companies made a shitload of money out of building distribution channels and affiliate program management systems – affiliates are a wonderful idea as long as you are capable of managing these in a proper manner (See my comment about commission only sales people).
All in all, Michael surely has some valid points, however, these require delicate work and proper management in order to work right – if executed improperly, will not only end in failure, may also send you down debt country.
So long Fedora… Hello Mandriva PowerPack
Oct 30th
For the past 3 years I’ve been a devoted CentOS/Fedora fan. I mean, while CentOS gave me a highly robust and stable server platform, Fedora enriched my desktop and allowed me to work seemlessly and easily. While others kept snering at me: “Fedora? Fedora? I use Ubuntu, I’m hard core Debian”, I kept to myself and kept on working with my Fedora desktop.
Before I move on, I’ll have to comment with the following: Over the years I’ve become somewhat agnostic to my choice of desktop. Where I seemed to use Fedora, Ubunto, XP or Vista, it all seemed to do the same job for me – just allow me to run Eclipse properly, provide me with a 90% stable environment and allow my office productivity to increase – and I was fairly content. My uncle, who lives in the US, is a hard core, highly devoted Mac fan. He’s been a Mac fan since the early 1990′s, and always tried migrating me to Mac, however, I kept to my PC and RedHat Desktop. Now, as time progressed, Linux Desktop evolved – actually, it is so evolved today, that I get the same buzz working on KDE or GNOME that I get working on MacOSX – so now, from my point of view, the desktop environment is completely agnostic.
Now, back in 2000 I was a devoted Mandrake Linux fan – I was so devoted that I got the company I was working for to represent them in Israel (the year was 2000 may I remind you). Now, 8 years later, some one picked up the tab of representing Mandriva Linux in Israel (formerly Mandriva) and he asked me to evaluate the new Mandriva Power Pack edition and the Mandriva 8GB Flash Edition.
The installation
The new Mandriva installer is so simple, that even my 9 year old nease will be able to install it. Bearing in mind that I was installing on a fresh computer, the installation was streight forward. I’ve installed the Power Pack 2008 distro on a spiffy new Pentium 4 Core Duo 2 machine, running at 2.0GHz with 4GB RAM and 2 hard drives of 160GB – NICE!
One thing I always remembered about Mandriva installations was that the package selector was very simplistic, and the 2008 version is no different – it’s a good thing to know that Mandriva doesn’t go about changing things that work – like Fedora or Ubuntu. The installation process itself is clean and runs smoothly, even on a highly advanced board with a funky NVidia display adapter. Actually, after the installation completed, I was greeted with an Nvidia logo upon rebooting, indicating me that I need to configure my screen settings for my card – that’s much better than running into a text screen that doesn’t really help the novice.
URPMI – The ever annoying package manager
Ok, apt-get and yum are MUCH (and I do mean MUCH) more advanced than urpmi. However, using the easyurpmi web tool enables you to add web based urpmi repositories, making your entire urpmi experience less painful. As I was using yum and Fedora/CentOS over the past 3-4 years, it took me a while to re-acustom back to the urpmi methodology of thinking – however, one thing to say about urpmi – it’s fast, way faster than yum.
Mandriva Configuration Tool
The Mandriva configuration tool is a delight to use, easy, straight forward, gives you all the options that you may need – all in all, a very pleasent experience. The nice thing about it, is that even if you managed to screw up something in one graphical environment, you can always invokes another one, launch it, verify/fix your faulty installation (although, it’s very hard to mis-install anything on Mandriva), and you’re back on your way.
I’ll be adding more information about my findings in the future…
Israel now officially speaks Arabic
Oct 18th
Apparently, according to the BBC, the most spoken language in Israel is most probably Arabic. Well, at least judging from their website. I was browsing the web for some information about the “Doctor Who” TV series (if you have no idea what I’m talking about – shame on you!). As it is a BBC series, I pointed my browser to the BBC website, to be greeted with the following:
While I’m not offended at all (really I’m not), I do pitty the people at the BBC that can’t seem to get their GeoIP working properly, and mistake Israel for another Middle Eastern country. It is true that there are many Arabic speaking residents and citizens in Israel, but still, the major language here is Hebrew.
Clicking the banner actually brought me to an HP page, fully in English, fully targeted to this region.
In the words of a great man: “Not bad – but not perfect”.
Picasa
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
wikipedia
Youtube
RSS